Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver ( waymo.com ) 129 points by ra7 7 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 111 comments mlsu 1 hour ago | next [–] Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile. The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. reply kjksf 30 minutes ago | parent | next [–] Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it. Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD. Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program. Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla. And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. reply AlotOfReading 46 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future. reply MetaWhirledPeas 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] > Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable. reply standardUser 17 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs. reply harikb 48 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber. What you envision might happen in 2100+ reply standardUser 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo. reply garbawarb 6 hours ago | prev | next [–] I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee) reply lacker 1 hour ago | parent | next [–] It seems tough culturally. If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making. So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work. It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk. reply Alive-in-2025 45 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down. At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements. Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter. There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there. What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 ( https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market ). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work. Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day). This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though. reply lacker 7 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started. That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell. reply syntaxing 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO. (Also former Cruise employee) reply sja 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary. (Another former employee) reply AlotOfReading 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–] I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways. (Another former). reply xnx 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out. Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM. reply jessriedel 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again. Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling. reply xnx 4 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person. reply helge9210 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party. reply cortesoft 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior) He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up. reply someonehere 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart. Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving. I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience. If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me. reply Rohansi 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it? reply RivieraKid 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing. Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.) reply nradov 53 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] For national security reasons, several other countries won't allow Waymo (or Tesla or any other US company) to "win" in their territory. This will ensure that at least a couple other competitors remain worldwide regardless of whether it makes sense in purely economic terms. reply soperj 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since. reply ForHackernews 1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero. That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf... reply anonymous908213 54 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean literally one company with 100% marketshare globally? reply ibejoeb 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech. reply KenSF 1 hour ago | parent | prev | next [–] We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0] [0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/ reply Hawkenfall 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved. GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru... [2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed... ! reply kjkjadksj 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after. reply kccqzy 13 minutes ago | prev | next [–] I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is? reply ZuLuuuuuu 7 hours ago | prev | next [–] "the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs" Nice abbreviation. reply plmpsu 6 hours ago | parent | next [–] I loved it. reply ilaksh 2 hours ago | prev | next [–] The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time. It's weird how many people there are like that still. But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years. reply hnuser123456 1 hour ago | parent | next [–] Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t... reply SeanAnderson 50 minutes ago | prev | next [–] Is the TL;DR of the article that they're launching this ( https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet... ) new vehicle design? I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers) reply nutjob2 1 hour ago | prev | next [–] "leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens." Nice dig at Tesla. reply qwerpy 6 minutes ago | parent | next [–] I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage. reply devmor 1 hour ago | prev | next [–] Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers. reply nradov 50 minutes ago | parent | next [–] Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something. reply devmor 47 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Yep! I'm not sure if they're waiting to pick people up or what, but they are straight up blocking traffic regularly in Midtown Atlanta. Usually its at least in the rightmost lane of a dual lane going the same direction, but a couple times now I've had to drive into the opposing traffic lane to get around them. reply standardUser 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] Maybe the menace is the drivers. That's indisputable when you look at injuries per mile. reply tgrowazay 6 hours ago | prev | next [–] Elon in shambles > Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens. reply xnx 6 hours ago | parent | next [–] Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up. reply youarentrightjr 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor) The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450 reply jacquesm 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–] Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength. No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up. This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure. reply girvo 1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius reply youarentrightjr 16 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Agreed, anyone who has worked on engineering a moderately complex system involving sensing has explored the power of multi domain sensing... without sensor fusion we'd be in the stone ages. reply xnx 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Truly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue. reply hamdingers 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Because they bought a Tesla with only cameras on it. Admitting this would be admitting their Tesla will never be self driving. reply baggachipz 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–] I bought mine with cameras and a radar, which they then deprecated and left an unused. Even though autopilot was better when it had radar. Then I realized that this thing would never be self-driving and that its CEO was throwing nazi salutes. Cut my losses and got rid of it. Gotta admit defeat sometimes. reply xnx 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Add a tow hitch to Waymos and any car can be autonomous! reply wat10000 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Do Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there. reply SoftTalker 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating. reply nrclark 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car. reply catigula 1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] To be fair, humans are fairly poor drivers and generally can't be trusted to drive millions of miles safely. reply nradov 40 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better. reply catigula 12 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Incorrect. Humans are fairly good engineers, so cars are pretty safe nowadays. If you include minor fender-benders and unreported incidents, estimates drop to around 100,000–200,000 miles between any collision event. This is cataclysmically bad for a designed system, which is why targets are super-human, not human. torginus 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ. So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed. reply _diyar 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value). But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders. reply azinman2 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim? reply Veserv 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Especially the part where the cameras do not meet minimum vision requirements [1] in many states where it operates such as California and Texas. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43605034 reply Rohansi 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me. The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-cleaning for the cameras that get very dirty. reply jeffbee 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] FSD doesn't "work fine" driving directly into the sun. There are loads of YT videos that demonstrate this. reply Rohansi 14 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] For which car? The older the car (hardware) version the worse it is. I've never had any front camera blinding issues with a 2022 car (HW3). The thing to remember about cameras is what you see in an image/display is not what the camera sees. Processing the image reduces the dynamic range but FSD could work off of the raw sensor data. llsf 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps. There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability. I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test. reply _diyar 57 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Nuanced point: Even if vision alone were sufficient to drive, adding sensors to the cars today could speed up development. Tesla‘s world model could be improved, speeding up development of the vision only model that is truly autonomous. reply tux1968 1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] The other day I slammed the brakes at a green light, because I could hear sirens approaching -- even though the buildings on the corner prevented any view of the approaching fire trucks or their flashing lights. Do Teslas not have this ability? reply _diyar 55 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] I don‘t know whether Tesla‘s self-driving mode could do that. However, notice that deaf people are allowed to drive, ie. you are not expected to be able to have full hearing to be allowed on the road. reply iwontberude 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I think his companies succeeded despite Elon. Tesla should be a $5T company and he fucked it up. reply _diyar 54 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Stongly disagree. I don‘t like the fella but thinking that he founds and successfully manages SpaceX and Tesla to their market value _by chance_ is ridiculous. reply wolrah 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] > I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. I would firmly disagree with that. What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc. The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips. The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors. If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now. SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck. reply _diyar 59 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] You say that you disagree with my point, but then your first paragraph just restates my argument. And your subsequent paragraphs don‘t refer to my comment at all. I never claimed he‘s a good engineer, nor that he has high EQ, nor that he is honest, nor that he has sole responsibility for the success of his companies. reply rgmerk 53 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast). reply lateforwork 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] His autopilot has killed several people, sometimes the owner of the car, sometimes other drivers sharing the road. It is hard to root for this guy. reply netsharc 44 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] > The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?". Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they've been stupid enough to have been fooled to vote for "Idi Amin in whiteface" (term coined by Literature Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka), or that the "nation's right to self-defense" they've been defending was a thin excuse for mass murder of innocents. reply weirdmantis69 25 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] I've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously. reply netsharc 4 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] And what fraction Elon-Intelligence is needed to believe he actually invented/solved all that by himself? Or did I miss the sarcasm? BurningFrog 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I certainly don't trust anything he says 100%. This is - to me - entirely separate from the fact that his companies routinely revolutionize industries. reply FireBeyond 25 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Well, given that Elon openly lies on investor calls... One of his latest, on the topic of rain/snow/mist/fog and handling with cameras: "Well, we have made that a non-issue as we actually do photon counting in the cameras, which solves that problem." No, Elon, you don't. For two reasons: reason one, part A, the types of cameras that do photon counting don't work well for normal 'vision'/imagery associated with cameras, and part B, are not actually present in your cars at all. And reason two, photon counting requires the camera being in an enclosed space to work, which cars on the road ... aren't. What Elon has mastered the art of is making statements that sound informed, pass the BS detector of laypeople, and optionally are also plausibly deniable if actually called out by an SME. reply stefan_ 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] If only there was a filter so we could fuse different sensor measurements into a better whole.. reply 0xffff2 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least. reply fhd2 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever. reply inerte 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I know it's "illegal" and technically sold as FSD (assisted), but just 2 days ago I was in a friend's Model Y and it drove from work to my house (both in San Jose) without any steering wheel or pedal touch, at all. And he told me he went to Palm Springs like that too. I shit on Tesla and Elon on any opportunity, and it's a shame they basically have the software out there doing things when it probably shouldn't, but I don't think they're that far behind Waymo where it really matters, which is the thing actually working. reply sjsdaiuasgdia 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] The terms of service probably require you to sue Tesla in that Texas district with his corrupt judge pal. reply willio58 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive. reply jcalvinowens 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] > humans only use vision to drive I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving? As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :) reply xnx 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] > hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved Not to mention possibly the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain: 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections. reply ACCount37 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Human inner ear is worse than a $3 IMU in your average smartphone in literally every way. And that IMU also has a magnetometer in it. Beating human sensors wasn't hard for over a decade now. The problem is that sensors are worthless. Self-driving lives and dies by AI - all the sensors need to be is "good enough". reply Cold_Miserable 58 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Human hearing is excellent. Good directional perception and sensitivity. Eyesight is the weakest sense. Poor color sensitivity, low light sensitivity, blindspot. The terrible natural design flaws are compensated by natural nystagmas and the brain filling in the blanks. reply jcalvinowens 2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] > The problem is that sensors are worthless Well, in TFA the far more successful manufacturer of self driving cars is saying you're wrong. I think they're in much better position to know than you :) reply kjksf 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 1. in US you can get a driver's license if you're deaf so as a society we think you can drive without hearing 2. since this is in context of Tesla: tesla cars do have microphones and FSD does use it for responding to sirens etc. reply ibejoeb 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] (1) is true, but actually driving is definitely harder without hearing or with diminished hearing. And Several US states, including CA, prohibit inhibiting hearing while driving, e.g., by wearing a headset, earbuds, or earplugs. reply wat10000 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Involved? Yes. Necessary? Pretty sure no. If it makes you happy, you can read "only vision" as "no lidar or radar." Cars already have microphones and IMUs. reply aggie 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach. But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only. reply agildehaus 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Waymo has posted videos of accidents they've avoided purely because their lidar picked up on a pedestrian before their cameras saw anything. A favorite of mine: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1900219562437861685 reply autoexec 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–] They're very public about the data that makes them look good, but they went to court to keep their safety data from the public. ( https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/22/waymo-to-keep-robotaxi-saf... ) reply thevillagechief 17 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] That lawsuit was about trade secrets shared with DMV. And DMV advised them to file a restraining order against a third party seeking redacted info. reply torginus 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I think past experience shows that the US prefers a wait and see approach - owning in part I think to it federal structure, where states compete for companies good graces and money, so if State A bans something, State B will allow it and gain an advantage in that area. reply ibejoeb 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Moreover, why draw a hard line on vision only when there is existing technology is available to augment it? It's not like they have to develop 3 novel technologies. reply dweinus 4 hours ago | prev | next [2 more] [flagged] Rudybega 3 hours ago | parent | next [–] There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic). reply abraxas 46 minutes ago | prev [–] I honestly hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t reply SeanAnderson 30 minutes ago | parent | next [–] I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit. I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage. I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership. It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position. reply abraxas 19 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] You exemplify the defeatism that the auto makers are counting on. reply SeanAnderson 18 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] I literally have never owned a vehicle in my life. If you feel I exemplify defeatism then I think you need to look inward. reply hadlock 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future. reply kccqzy 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities. reply mclau153 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [–] Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas? reply abraxas 40 minutes ago | root | parent [–] No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making. reply hungryhobbit 6 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Why are you trying to make people on a text-based site watch a dumb video. Just say what you want to say ... with words! reply Zanni 9 minutes ago | root | parent | prev [–] That video is 54 minutes long. Maybe, if it's the basis for your argument, you could post a summary? reply Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact Search: